8 ms·

I find it sad what is happening to the journalism industry as it is 'disrupted' by the internet. Where are we going to get our news from after all the news org

I find it sad what is happening to the journalism industry as it is 'disrupted' by the internet. Where are we going to get our news from after all the news organizations shut down? From our friends on Facebook who already agree with us? From propaganda mills that hire people to write fake social media posts? The industry may not have been perfect, but on its best days it uncovered important stories, and backed it up with fact checking and an attempt at being fair and balanced.

erickhill 10y ago
Agree with your sentiments, very much so. That being said, 'Self' magazine was hardly news. It's the kind of self-help mag often found in doctors' offices, and maybe shoved into a purse for a quick flight somewhere. It's sad for the employees involved and a few die-hard readers, but not a massive loss. EDIT: My wife is a subscriber, and typically reads it while lying in bed one night out of the month.
- gerbilly 10y ago
  Point taken that 'Self' isn't news, but I was commenting on the wider climate where newspapers and magazines, are either cutting back or outright closing. I'm close to someone in the industry, but honestly you don't have to be to see the decline if you look for it.
  - throw_away 10y ago
    Financial problems at Conde Nast could also be trouble for some of their other publications, which may be more popular amongst this crowd, such as Ars Technica, Wired and The New Yorker.
  - erickhill 10y ago
    Oh, I totally get it. I used to work in the industry myself. Well, the magazine industry, not "news" per se. I worked at InfoWorld when InfoWorld was still a print pub. The print side died when I was working there, and we were the 1st IDG pub to go full online-only. It was rough, to say the least. I don't envy the small core team that will stay behind. the print pub often over-inflated the value of the online offering. Once that piece is lobbed off, the remaining team eventually gets whittled down to a skeleton crew. It can be profitable, but margins are thin and cost-cutting is everywhere. All good things for any business to do, but it can also be a massive change in culture and morale. I also worked at AFAR, the travel pub. Getting online mags to profitability is no easy task. And print mags can cost a fortune. When print ad dollars go elsewhere... well, you can see what's going on.
zapt02 10y ago
Currently working at a major publishing house, I wish more people shared your sentiment. The news may not be perfectly unbiased, but at least it's fact-checked and not malicious. From what I gather nobody has any idea how traditional publishing houses are going to dig themselves out of this. Native ads, a quality-over-quantity ad experience for advertisers and premium services (paywalls) are the holy trinity that everyone hopes will save the industry.
- mozumder 10y ago
  Pretty sure what's going to happen is we're going to pay for news, at $100/year or so, like we pay for Netflix. You can probably get 100,000 people in a small city to buy that (given proper branding/marketing), and that's enough to hire a local newsroom of about 100 people.
  - zapt02 10y ago
    I don't think you are right, because nobody has succeeded at the scope you have suggested - never mind local papers, even prestigious publications like TIME are having a very tough time, which I doubt is a "branding/marketing" issue. You are vastly overestimating the "will to pay" for journalism. It's much more likely that local news desks will disappear in favor for a central and smaller product.
    - mozumder 10y ago
      Bezos is pushing that model at a larger scale in the Washington Post. We'll have to see how well that works.
      - magic_beans 10y ago
        I pay for Washington Post and NYT. Honestly, I couldn't live without them. Not for your typical daily news, but for the truly interesting stories. It's good stuff. I could spend hours.
  - LordFrith 10y ago
rz2k 10y ago
The article says that Condé Nast would not say whether David Remnick editor of The New Yorker would report to Anna Wintour. While I have no opinion on Anna Wintour, I think that The New Yorker is pretty nearly the best that exists right now. After Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek it became better than The Economist. If Condé Nast is in blame the industry mode, or if it's going to start making short-sighted decisions claiming necessity, hopefully someone else can take care of its best properties.
- walterbell 10y ago
  Does Bloomberg require BusinessWeek to be profitable?
  - mappingbabeljc 10y ago
    It just instituted a bunch of changes which will radically change the magazine and may make it break even. "A person familiar with the matter said the publication, which Bloomberg acquired in 2009, was on pace to lose between $20 million and $30 million this year." http://www.wsj.com/articles/bloomberg-changes-businessweek-leaders-ends-political-tv-program-1479414097 http://www.wsj.com/articles/bloomberg-changes-businessweek-l...
    - rz2k 10y ago
      According to what I could find online, the advertising rates they can charge make The New Yorker relatively profitable. Do you know if Bloomberg television is profotable or mainly a vehicle for promoting the brand? The reporting is a whole lot higher quality than CNBC, but the ads, especially in the evening seem like they are pretty cheap.
      - donohoe 10y ago
        Between subscriptions and ads, I can say from first-hand knowledge that The New Yorker is definitely one of the more profitable Conde barns/magazines.
  - 10y ago
toomuchspin33 10y ago
How about the institutions in the news themselves? I follow local emergency services on Twitter for alerts in my area. If shit gets real, all I want to know is where to avoid. Don't need to sit and gawk at CNN to get all the gossip. I reach out to instructors/professors and discuss the work of those that reply (usually in STEM). Occasionally receiving copies of papers that are paywalled after being "officially" published. Why do we need an aggregator like CNN, where a bunch of paid shills, spin out of context quotes leaving it no more useful than Facebook anyway? If you believe CBS Evening News and the rest haven't been propaganda mills all these years, I know of a bridge... It's trivial to find the useful information if you want to know what's happening around you. And it can often, if not always, be had straight from the horses mouth.
- gerbilly 10y ago
  We don't all have the time or the resources or the curiosity to connect all the raw data making up the news. Sure the newspapers can have a bias or conflicts of interest but the journalism industry at least attempts to mitigate these, there is a code of ethics. You can only do so much on your own, and through one on one interactions. Some people find it valuable to have others do this for them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sure it's imperfect, because there is always bias, but t's a lot easier to read a newspaper story about an issue than to redo all the work the reporter would have done, on every conceivable issue. You can even do your own fact checking after reading the paper. I'm mostly talking about newspaper reporting, and from high caliber sources, but your local community paper can be a good source of info as well. [1] http://english.stackexchange.com/a/244277 http://english.stackexchange.com/a/244277 (Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect)
zdean 10y ago
I don't think this is happening to journalism as much as journalism as an industry is doing it to themselves. I say this with the perspective of starting a local magazine in the early 2000s and running it for 10 years (and it's still going relatively strong after I moved on). Over the past couple of decades, I've watched as media companies with legacy business and editorial structures are (largely) unwilling or unable to adapt to new channels of disseminating important information or driving revenue. At the same time they've eroded trust with their audiences through efforts like advertorials in magazines and over-reliance on syndicated national/regional content in newspapers...and pandering in both. The ones that haven't are doing well. I remember a few years back reading a great piece by the great late writer David Carr who talked about SXSW and the local paper in Austin that spawned it as a great counter-example for how modern journalism as a business can be done well and successfully: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23carr.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23carr.html Those running the big media properties are either going to finally wake up and adapt or die off...meanwhile, there are lots of niche publishers (and I use that term very broadly in terms of channels) will step up and successfully fill the voids they're leaving behind.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  I know of three journalist outlets I'd be willing to pay for: * LWN https://lwn.net/ https://lwn.net/ * Harper's Magazine http://harpers.org/ http://harpers.org/ * Nautilus http://nautil.us/ http://nautil.us/ I'm not interested in paying for any current-news journalism because as far as I can tell nobody does a good enough job to warrant my money.
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    I think it says something when "the news" is competing with shows that are primarily comedic like Last Week Tonight and The Daily Show. Those shows are definitely as much entertainment as they are news, but they still seem to have as much actual journalism as broadcast news sources. My mom sits down every night to watch World News on ABC, followed by the local news. I can't stand watching either. There's very little content, every segment is interrupted by ads, and the interesting content is put at the very end so they can tease it before every commercial break. First Commercial: "Coming up after the break, we did some investigative journalism for once" Second Commercial: "Coming up: That investigative Journalism" Third Commercial: "Still after the break: What you actually want to see" 45 minutes and 10 commercials later: "And after this break, the investigative piece." And the investigative piece is 30 second long, says that the one person of interest wouldn't comment, and has less information than you could find out using a public portal on your local government's website. Then you get a 2 minute clip of a funny video from the internet chopped the hell up, with the anchors talking over it the entire time. "Tune in next week. More Americans get their news from ABC News than any other source."
blfr 10y ago
Where are we going to get our news from after all the news organizations shut down? I have stopped reading them or watching tv a while ago, and even started to actively avoid mainstream media. My life has not been impacted in any way except having a little more free time. News is not necessary. It doesn't enrich your life. It's just something to put on and feel smarter than if you put on a sitcom. Try this, I do it every time I'm home: watch people watch the news, and then ask them what was on. Pretend you didn't hear some segment or just flat out ask them to summarize. Most people most of the time won't be able to tell you. And they're perfectly functioning, intelligent adults. At best it doesn't matter. At worst it's actively harmful by giving you these easily accessible stories that bear no relation to your life. Good riddance.
- criddell 10y ago
  > Try this, I do it every time I'm home: watch people watch the news Do you think that's unique to television news, or do you think the same is true of people reading newspapers (analog or digital)?
  - blfr 10y ago
    I haven't tested it and no one I know still reads regular newspapers so it would be difficult. Perhaps reading is more active, or it's easier to "rewind" when your attention drifts off for a while, because people can definitely string together some summary of a book they're reading or read.
- loteck 10y ago
  Ignorance may be temporary bliss but I'd bet it turns out questionable long term results.
  - lelandbatey 10y ago
    I'm highly doubtful that ignoring "up to the minute" news is going to hurt anyone. "News" in it's most frequently consumed form now seems less like a useful presentation of information without slant and much more like "Journalists react." The useful news is usually not 'up to the minute', not particularly eye catching or entertaining, and is very well sourced. It usually takes the form of things like journal papers, voting records, or the results of careful document audits. It rarely is concerned with any single person and is much more concerned with the actions of many people over time. Basically, 'news' now seems mostly about entertainment, and telling people "you have an obligation to follow this particular form of entertainment" seems like a very silly thing to say.
criddell 10y ago
I'm still mostly optimistic. I think there was a lot of redundancies and too many papers were just printing wire stories and not adding a whole lot of value. Today, I think for major stories at a state, national, or international level, there are still lots of journalists and reporters doing quality work. Even derided publishers like Buzzfeed are doing some really good work among the listicles. I'm more worried about the local level. Who's going to cover local school board meetings or neighborhood news? Maybe that stuff doesn't need to be covered, I don't really know, but it feels like a loss. For the first time in about 20 years, I'm thinking about subscribing to my local paper again.
mikestew 10y ago
I find it sad what is happening to the journalism industry as it is 'disrupted' by the internet. Umm, have you actually read a copy of _Self_ magazine? My wife gets them before plane flights. It's the print equivalent to the listicle. Keep in mind that the print "journalism" you see at the checkout stand and at airports is just targeted advertising. The articles are there simply to draw the target demographic. The industry may not have been perfect, but on its best days it uncovered important stories, and backed it up with fact checking and an attempt at being fair and balanced. Which doesn't describe _Self_ magazine at all. Now, if CN was shuttering, say, _The New Yorker_ then we'd have reason to express dismay. But as I read it, CN is getting rid of the crap that we could probably all do just fine without.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jrnichols 10y ago
Why would I buy a $5 magazine anyway when the website has the exact same articles on it? Same articles, and page after page after page of advertisements. I tend to lump magazines in with more entertainment than journalism. The quality ones will stick around. Do we really need teenVogue and Cosmopolitan? There are a lot of magazines competing for a limited number of readers as it is.

erickhill 10y ago

Agree with your sentiments, very much so. That being said, 'Self' magazine was hardly news. It's the kind of self-help mag often found in doctors' offices, and maybe shoved into a purse for a quick flight somewhere. It's sad for the employees involved and a few die-hard readers, but not a massive loss. EDIT: My wife is a subscriber, and typically reads it while lying in bed one night out of the month.

gerbilly 10y ago
Point taken that 'Self' isn't news, but I was commenting on the wider climate where newspapers and magazines, are either cutting back or outright closing. I'm close to someone in the industry, but honestly you don't have to be to see the decline if you look for it.
- throw_away 10y ago
  Financial problems at Conde Nast could also be trouble for some of their other publications, which may be more popular amongst this crowd, such as Ars Technica, Wired and The New Yorker.
- erickhill 10y ago
  Oh, I totally get it. I used to work in the industry myself. Well, the magazine industry, not "news" per se. I worked at InfoWorld when InfoWorld was still a print pub. The print side died when I was working there, and we were the 1st IDG pub to go full online-only. It was rough, to say the least. I don't envy the small core team that will stay behind. the print pub often over-inflated the value of the online offering. Once that piece is lobbed off, the remaining team eventually gets whittled down to a skeleton crew. It can be profitable, but margins are thin and cost-cutting is everywhere. All good things for any business to do, but it can also be a massive change in culture and morale. I also worked at AFAR, the travel pub. Getting online mags to profitability is no easy task. And print mags can cost a fortune. When print ad dollars go elsewhere... well, you can see what's going on.

zapt02 10y ago

Currently working at a major publishing house, I wish more people shared your sentiment. The news may not be perfectly unbiased, but at least it's fact-checked and not malicious. From what I gather nobody has any idea how traditional publishing houses are going to dig themselves out of this. Native ads, a quality-over-quantity ad experience for advertisers and premium services (paywalls) are the holy trinity that everyone hopes will save the industry.

mozumder 10y ago
Pretty sure what's going to happen is we're going to pay for news, at $100/year or so, like we pay for Netflix. You can probably get 100,000 people in a small city to buy that (given proper branding/marketing), and that's enough to hire a local newsroom of about 100 people.
- zapt02 10y ago
  I don't think you are right, because nobody has succeeded at the scope you have suggested - never mind local papers, even prestigious publications like TIME are having a very tough time, which I doubt is a "branding/marketing" issue. You are vastly overestimating the "will to pay" for journalism. It's much more likely that local news desks will disappear in favor for a central and smaller product.
  - mozumder 10y ago
    Bezos is pushing that model at a larger scale in the Washington Post. We'll have to see how well that works.
    - magic_beans 10y ago
      I pay for Washington Post and NYT. Honestly, I couldn't live without them. Not for your typical daily news, but for the truly interesting stories. It's good stuff. I could spend hours.
- LordFrith 10y ago

rz2k 10y ago

The article says that Condé Nast would not say whether David Remnick editor of The New Yorker would report to Anna Wintour. While I have no opinion on Anna Wintour, I think that The New Yorker is pretty nearly the best that exists right now. After Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek it became better than The Economist. If Condé Nast is in blame the industry mode, or if it's going to start making short-sighted decisions claiming necessity, hopefully someone else can take care of its best properties.

walterbell 10y ago
Does Bloomberg require BusinessWeek to be profitable?
- mappingbabeljc 10y ago
  It just instituted a bunch of changes which will radically change the magazine and may make it break even. "A person familiar with the matter said the publication, which Bloomberg acquired in 2009, was on pace to lose between $20 million and $30 million this year." http://www.wsj.com/articles/bloomberg-changes-businessweek-leaders-ends-political-tv-program-1479414097 http://www.wsj.com/articles/bloomberg-changes-businessweek-l...
  - rz2k 10y ago
    According to what I could find online, the advertising rates they can charge make The New Yorker relatively profitable. Do you know if Bloomberg television is profotable or mainly a vehicle for promoting the brand? The reporting is a whole lot higher quality than CNBC, but the ads, especially in the evening seem like they are pretty cheap.
    - donohoe 10y ago
      Between subscriptions and ads, I can say from first-hand knowledge that The New Yorker is definitely one of the more profitable Conde barns/magazines.
- 10y ago

toomuchspin33 10y ago

How about the institutions in the news themselves? I follow local emergency services on Twitter for alerts in my area. If shit gets real, all I want to know is where to avoid. Don't need to sit and gawk at CNN to get all the gossip. I reach out to instructors/professors and discuss the work of those that reply (usually in STEM). Occasionally receiving copies of papers that are paywalled after being "officially" published. Why do we need an aggregator like CNN, where a bunch of paid shills, spin out of context quotes leaving it no more useful than Facebook anyway? If you believe CBS Evening News and the rest haven't been propaganda mills all these years, I know of a bridge... It's trivial to find the useful information if you want to know what's happening around you. And it can often, if not always, be had straight from the horses mouth.

gerbilly 10y ago
We don't all have the time or the resources or the curiosity to connect all the raw data making up the news. Sure the newspapers can have a bias or conflicts of interest but the journalism industry at least attempts to mitigate these, there is a code of ethics. You can only do so much on your own, and through one on one interactions. Some people find it valuable to have others do this for them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sure it's imperfect, because there is always bias, but t's a lot easier to read a newspaper story about an issue than to redo all the work the reporter would have done, on every conceivable issue. You can even do your own fact checking after reading the paper. I'm mostly talking about newspaper reporting, and from high caliber sources, but your local community paper can be a good source of info as well. [1] http://english.stackexchange.com/a/244277 http://english.stackexchange.com/a/244277 (Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect)

zdean 10y ago

I don't think this is happening to journalism as much as journalism as an industry is doing it to themselves. I say this with the perspective of starting a local magazine in the early 2000s and running it for 10 years (and it's still going relatively strong after I moved on). Over the past couple of decades, I've watched as media companies with legacy business and editorial structures are (largely) unwilling or unable to adapt to new channels of disseminating important information or driving revenue. At the same time they've eroded trust with their audiences through efforts like advertorials in magazines and over-reliance on syndicated national/regional content in newspapers...and pandering in both. The ones that haven't are doing well. I remember a few years back reading a great piece by the great late writer David Carr who talked about SXSW and the local paper in Austin that spawned it as a great counter-example for how modern journalism as a business can be done well and successfully: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23carr.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23carr.html Those running the big media properties are either going to finally wake up and adapt or die off...meanwhile, there are lots of niche publishers (and I use that term very broadly in terms of channels) will step up and successfully fill the voids they're leaving behind.

colechristensen 10y ago
I know of three journalist outlets I'd be willing to pay for: * LWN https://lwn.net/ https://lwn.net/ * Harper's Magazine http://harpers.org/ http://harpers.org/ * Nautilus http://nautil.us/ http://nautil.us/ I'm not interested in paying for any current-news journalism because as far as I can tell nobody does a good enough job to warrant my money.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  I think it says something when "the news" is competing with shows that are primarily comedic like Last Week Tonight and The Daily Show. Those shows are definitely as much entertainment as they are news, but they still seem to have as much actual journalism as broadcast news sources. My mom sits down every night to watch World News on ABC, followed by the local news. I can't stand watching either. There's very little content, every segment is interrupted by ads, and the interesting content is put at the very end so they can tease it before every commercial break. First Commercial: "Coming up after the break, we did some investigative journalism for once" Second Commercial: "Coming up: That investigative Journalism" Third Commercial: "Still after the break: What you actually want to see" 45 minutes and 10 commercials later: "And after this break, the investigative piece." And the investigative piece is 30 second long, says that the one person of interest wouldn't comment, and has less information than you could find out using a public portal on your local government's website. Then you get a 2 minute clip of a funny video from the internet chopped the hell up, with the anchors talking over it the entire time. "Tune in next week. More Americans get their news from ABC News than any other source."

blfr 10y ago

Where are we going to get our news from after all the news organizations shut down? I have stopped reading them or watching tv a while ago, and even started to actively avoid mainstream media. My life has not been impacted in any way except having a little more free time. News is not necessary. It doesn't enrich your life. It's just something to put on and feel smarter than if you put on a sitcom. Try this, I do it every time I'm home: watch people watch the news, and then ask them what was on. Pretend you didn't hear some segment or just flat out ask them to summarize. Most people most of the time won't be able to tell you. And they're perfectly functioning, intelligent adults. At best it doesn't matter. At worst it's actively harmful by giving you these easily accessible stories that bear no relation to your life. Good riddance.

criddell 10y ago
> Try this, I do it every time I'm home: watch people watch the news Do you think that's unique to television news, or do you think the same is true of people reading newspapers (analog or digital)?
- blfr 10y ago
  I haven't tested it and no one I know still reads regular newspapers so it would be difficult. Perhaps reading is more active, or it's easier to "rewind" when your attention drifts off for a while, because people can definitely string together some summary of a book they're reading or read.
loteck 10y ago
Ignorance may be temporary bliss but I'd bet it turns out questionable long term results.
- lelandbatey 10y ago
  I'm highly doubtful that ignoring "up to the minute" news is going to hurt anyone. "News" in it's most frequently consumed form now seems less like a useful presentation of information without slant and much more like "Journalists react." The useful news is usually not 'up to the minute', not particularly eye catching or entertaining, and is very well sourced. It usually takes the form of things like journal papers, voting records, or the results of careful document audits. It rarely is concerned with any single person and is much more concerned with the actions of many people over time. Basically, 'news' now seems mostly about entertainment, and telling people "you have an obligation to follow this particular form of entertainment" seems like a very silly thing to say.

criddell 10y ago

I'm still mostly optimistic. I think there was a lot of redundancies and too many papers were just printing wire stories and not adding a whole lot of value. Today, I think for major stories at a state, national, or international level, there are still lots of journalists and reporters doing quality work. Even derided publishers like Buzzfeed are doing some really good work among the listicles. I'm more worried about the local level. Who's going to cover local school board meetings or neighborhood news? Maybe that stuff doesn't need to be covered, I don't really know, but it feels like a loss. For the first time in about 20 years, I'm thinking about subscribing to my local paper again.

mikestew 10y ago

I find it sad what is happening to the journalism industry as it is 'disrupted' by the internet. Umm, have you actually read a copy of _Self_ magazine? My wife gets them before plane flights. It's the print equivalent to the listicle. Keep in mind that the print "journalism" you see at the checkout stand and at airports is just targeted advertising. The articles are there simply to draw the target demographic. The industry may not have been perfect, but on its best days it uncovered important stories, and backed it up with fact checking and an attempt at being fair and balanced. Which doesn't describe _Self_ magazine at all. Now, if CN was shuttering, say, _The New Yorker_ then we'd have reason to express dismay. But as I read it, CN is getting rid of the crap that we could probably all do just fine without.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jrnichols 10y ago

Why would I buy a $5 magazine anyway when the website has the exact same articles on it? Same articles, and page after page after page of advertisements. I tend to lump magazines in with more entertainment than journalism. The quality ones will stick around. Do we really need teenVogue and Cosmopolitan? There are a lot of magazines competing for a limited number of readers as it is.